


supermoon

by goshemily



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-30
Updated: 2012-07-30
Packaged: 2017-11-11 01:55:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/pseuds/goshemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Brad is gone Nate breathes.</p><p>Counting down hours is too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	supermoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wearemany](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/gifts).



> She saw this picture and asked for Brad and Nate. Thank you to [andsparkles](http://archiveofourown.org/users/andsparkles) for looking it over!

  


When Brad is gone Nate breathes

    

_Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,_

    

and goes to work

    

_murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,_

    

and lives his life

    

_hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,_

    

and they are together

    

_great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion_  


    

and he doesn’t have to look at his left hand to know.

D.C. happens all around him, mouth-tilts and white papers and Egypt, cherry blossoms, blizzard warnings, American foreign policy and un-foreign wars and their apartment really needs vacuuming. They live here, and he knows Ben’s Chili Bowl and what it’s like to go to Cakelove with Ray Person. Nate’s gone with Brad to Arlington, though not on Memorial Day. At the Tomb of the Unknowns they held hands.

Counting down hours is too much, lying in bed watching the sun rise, so he gets up and runs out to the Tidal Basin and around the early tourists 

    

– passing the National Gallery he’s thinking statuary, white marble _homoerotic as fuck, sir_ , Brad said once looking at Rodin, sidelong at Nate, and Nate sees discus throwers, Greece and young men on their knees grasping for arrows, arched taut with thrown-back heads and seamless rock and blank eyes –

    

and when he gets home he reorganizes his bookshelves because it’s not like he’ll be mocked for that, no, it’s not like he’s holding splayed book spines and imagining backing Brad up against their living room wall. It’s not like he runs his knuckles over the brick and thinks about beardburn on his thighs.

Nate touches _The Symposium_ , remembers freshman year, agape and apotheosis and eros and learning the waiting spaces. He doesn’t pick up _The Iliad_.

He buys beer and apples and good cheese, sharp colors and sharp smells, and checks his email six times and calls his mother. “It’s the supermoon,” she says. “If you’re not doing anything, you should look at the pictures.” He does, restless with a laptop propped on his knees as he sits on the floor. He chants _not Eurydice not Eurydice_ in his head. The moon is orange over the Parthenon.

When he hears the right footsteps in the hall he has Brad inside and against the door in the space of a breath, holds him there, and “I’m fine,” Brad says. “Nate. I’m fine.” Nate feels his own sudden smile. Brad nods at him and grins wide and overtired and he’s too thin and Nate moves into him, gets one hand behind his head and one along his jaw and kisses him, eyes open.

**Author's Note:**

> [This](http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780140275360-2) is the Robert Fagles translation of _The Iliad_. I love it! Also, Wikipedia [would like us to know](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermoon) that _The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific communities, as they prefer the term perigee-syzygy_.


End file.
